Dr Bob Putsch Biography

Bob Putsch retired as Clinical Professor Emeritus of Medicine from the University of Washington School of Medicine. A primary care internist from 1968 to 2002, he cross-covered the nephrology service for ten years. He continued to see patients at Asian Counseling and Referral Service through January 2008 where he’d seen psychiatric patients weekly for more than 25 years.

In 1985 he published Cross-cultural Communications: The special case of interpreters in health care in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The paper helped the old USPHS teaching hospital to seek Kellogg funding for Seattle’s Cross-Cultural Health Care Program (CCHCP). Major projects at CCHCP included hosting and co-hosting meetings about interpretation in health care, efforts that eventuated in the development of the National Council on Interpretation in Health Care.

His writings cover a broad range of issues from Cross-cultural communications, ghost illness in three tribes (Navajo, Salish and Hmong), methodology and language in cross-cultural care, the meaning of death to adolescents in an American Indian community, to ethical dilemmas arising from differences in class, culture, language and power, and end-of-life decision making.

His ACRS panel consisted of patients who were entirely limited English proficient speaking Khmer, Vietnamese, Hmong, Lao, Mien, Samoan, Chinese and a variety of other SE Asian languages and dialects. His most recent article, The Living Dead: Interactions between the living and the dead in clinical practice, published in The Pharos is available on the web and describes a number of cases seen across boundaries of language and culture.